


Alternative American Wizard Schools: Maralleyne University

by darkmagess



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Beauxbatons, New Orleans, Voodoo, american wizard, fic ideas, wizard schools
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-06
Updated: 2016-07-06
Packaged: 2018-07-22 00:53:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7412017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkmagess/pseuds/darkmagess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The American university for the dark arts and defense against said arts, set on a hidden isle in Louisiana's most famous lake, a short jaunt from New Orleans, the state's most haunted city.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alternative American Wizard Schools: Maralleyne University

# Maralleyne University, Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana

  * Founded in 1788 following The Great New Orleans Fire, which destroyed the original school building, by Étienne Maralleyne, the third son of a chef in Marseille and a pureblood graduate from Beauxbaton and his wife Roxane, a mudblood Beauxbaton grad.
  * Also known as Hex-U.
  * Primary studies in jinxes, hexes, curses, demonology, potions, and the study of loa. While students may study voodoo, conference of a degree does not grant a student the right to be queen, king, priestess, or priest, as voodoo is a spiritual practice in addition to a magical one.
  * Because of the focus given to the dark arts, Maralleyne is also home to the premiere Defense against the Dark Arts teachers in North America. One must always be on hand during hex and curse classes, as a precaution.
  * Colors: Purple and Silver
  * Accessible by the paddlewheel boat  _Le Cygne d’Argent_



The school now resides on a hidden island in Lake Pontchartrain, protected by a misdirection spell that directs anyone attempting to approach without using an enchanted boat around the island. They find themselves simply unable to point their vessel directly at it. It is also cloaked with an invisibility spell, so the water’s surface appears unbroken.

The university is built like a replica French Quarter, with dorms in the style of Creole townhouses and changing architectural styles as new buildings had to be added throughout the years. The oldest classroom building is a Greek revival, multi-story structure at the center of the island called Bellerose Hall. Potions are taught in the Villemont Lab. The Navarro House contains most of the modern classrooms, reinforced for upperclass hexes and curses. There is also an aquarium, theater, performing art center, jazz club, and sports complex.

Aquatic studies are also popular because of the location on the lake. Though the lake beast, Victor, is not strictly speaking a subject of study.

By American standards, Maralleyne is exceptionally haunted. Due, in part, to its age, but also to the kind of study performed there over the years. It is home to a combination of hostile and benevolent specters, minor demons, and dangerous wildlife.

Owing in part to the climate and in part to Roxane Maralleyne’s hobbies, the university campus is also graced with several extensive gardens. The botanical gardens grow a wide range of magical and mundane plants, all useful for the creation of potions and poisons. It is, perhaps, the most deadly garden one may ever peruse, and it produces enough ingredients yearly for the student body to get all their ingredients for free. Alumni may come and pick from the garden by appointment.

In addition, is the Living Labyrinth, a walking garden maze that is exactly as it sounds.

## History

Étienne founded the school with the help of his wife, Roxane, a mudblood graduate from Beauxbaton. Étienne’s particular interest in magic swung toward the dark, with a strong study in hexes and curses, much to the surprise of friends and comrades, who thought him congenial and well-mannered.

He began his wizarding career like most other Beauxbatons, entranced by the idyllic setting, awed by the wonders that magic could create in the world. His third year, the Tri-Cup Tournament was held at Durmstrang, and that trip proved to have a lasting effect. Étienne found himself in a castle, far darker and more oppressive than any place he’d ever seen. The students had a confidence and brooding about them, and held Beauxbatons in particular contempt for being soft and weak, no doubt due to a mixture of muggle-born blood. Étienne attempted to defend his school’s honor, only to be challenged to a jinx duel. The Durmstrangs laughed when he couldn’t cast even so simple a dark spell, and for the first time he had an inkling that they might be right. As they walked away, he asked them to teach him.

The ring leader, Rainer Falkorson, turned back and studied him a moment before nodding slowly. Perhaps curious to see if Beauxbatons could be made of tougher stuff, Rainer taught Étienne his first jinx in an empty courtyard, with no faculty in sight. It was a simple stumble, to make one of the Durmstrangs fall over. But it felt powerful. The two remained friends after that. And when Étienne returned to his home school, he began searching the library for more information on the dark arts. Everything he had been studying up until then was minor mendings, healing potions, harmless charms like flight.

The books in the library most likely to contain what he wanted resisted his attempts to read them. They moved away on the shelves. Disappeared out of his hands. Or refused to hold their words in proper order. Étienne began a correspondence with Rainer to acquire what information he could, and the thirst for what had been denied him drove him to engage in an “independent study.”

His command of these arts was precise, technically, if not well-used practically. He had, several times after his schooling was complete, been forced to duel and come out on top.

Roxane le Denay de Quemadeuc may have been mudblood in the wizard world, but she was the daughter of a noble house in Lamballe, Brittany. Her older sister, who showed no magical talent, was expected to carry on her mother’s title, leaving Roxane free to pursue other interests. She attended Beauxbaton, eager to see the wizarding world, so promising beyond the walls of her mansion home, only to find that the school looked and felt much like the noble life she was leaving behind. Lessons took precision, much like music, but lacked depth. She could create beauty but change nothing. Where was the power? The influence?

Her ennui found its match in Étienne, who she discovered in one of the gardens well past curfew poorly mixing a poison potion from notes scrawled on a page. Roxane snatched the paper from him and read the formula over his protests. She could tell on first glance what he’d done wrong and set about brewing it correctly before he hurt himself. It was a simple thing, to make oneself toxic to mosquitoes. Roxane insisted on testing it on herself, since she brewed it, and they hatched a plan to escape from school for a day to find an appropriate pond.

After that, Roxane nurtured a penchant for potions, particularly poisons of various kinds, effective against many species. She was considered mostly “quiet” but with a piercing look that others found unnerving. Through her mother’s connections, she was able to purchase the books she wanted, the kind that Beauxbaton would not keep in the library for ordinary students.

Her magic took on a new shade—one that she could share with Étienne and precious few others they met from the other schools.

They moved to the new world as French sentiment against the nobility made it clear that Roxane would not be welcome in Brittany much longer. Originally, their New Orleans school was simply classes held in the parlor of their home for the few children of magical talent who found themselves in New Orleans in the early days. It was a dangerous time, and the city filled with rough characters. Without any established safehouses for magical practice, children had to be taught early to hide their talents among the outside world.

Étienne made his galleons sending back exotic plants and animals for sale to European emporiums. Roxane’s potions, brewed from these new ingredients, brought in a hefty price. Roxane worked among the muggles as a seamstress, using her magical talent to restore items behind closed doors.

They had, perhaps, twenty students ranging in age at the time of the first fire. Despite the new building codes, they decided that the school had best move outside the city limits, if they were going to move on to more advanced techniques. Ones that may well spark future fires. Plus, the children wanted to learn to fly broomsticks, and that could hardly be done in the center of town.

They settled on the lake, raising enough land to support a campus, and through the combined efforts of all the magical practitioners in New Orleans, dropping a cloak across the island. Étienne worked for some time on the misdirection spell to thwart wayward travelers.

After initial construction was complete, Étienne planted a wailing willow in front of the main hall that remains to this day, prodigious and active as ever, its cries at dusk can be heard across campus, usually signaling that it’s time for dinner.

Early on, French and European wizards at the school clashed with New Orleans’s Voodoo practitioners, claiming they were either charlatans or actual practitioners breaking the code and performing magic for the muggle world. Priests and priestesses worked primarily through physical charms instead of spoken spells. When one of the university’s faculty went blind from a gris-gris, the community was forced to admit the efficacy of Voodoo and hoodoo magic and called for a truce. The professor who had been struck blind was so enthralled by the magic, which they had been unable to break, that she asked the voodoo priestess, Cecilia Villemont, to take a teaching position at the school. Villemont agreed upon the stipulation that creole and black students be admitted.

It was a contentious decision. Several faculty resigned their posts in protest. Roxane argued for the advancement in learning that would come from the influx of this new magic. It was clear there were potions, poisons, and charms that they had no knowledge of.

The direction of Maralleyne as the dark arts school of the Americas cemented with the arrival of Iollan Hynes during the first wave of Irish immigrant to New Orleans. Iollan brought a specialty in demonology and a thirst for exploring the potential of the new world. He also brought an actual demon, and only the university’s facilities could play host to such a creature safely.


End file.
